Now On YouTube: More Ads!
YouTube’s homepage ads sell really well. But lots of people visit YouTube without ever looking at the homepage. So Google’s video site is looking for more clean, well-lit real estate it can sell to advertisers.
Enter “First Watch” ads, a new pitch from the video site: It offers to run a pre-roll ad in front of a visitor’s first YouTube video of the day, depending on the kind of video they’re watching.
This will only work for videos submitted by YouTube “partners,” so you won’t see the ad if you’re watching your pal’s dog on a skateboard.
But Google has no problem finding inventory from vetted sources. It tells the New York Times it has been exposing 15 million viewers a day to First Watch ads during a testing period, compared to 50 million views of auto-playing ads on YouTube’s home page.
This is pretty straightforward stuff. But it does serve to remind us that:
- Google continues to figure out how to extract more revenue out of YouTube, which may or may not be profitable. Also along those lines, note its hire of P&G exec Lucas Watson to run sales for the site.
- Part of YouTube’s evolution involves playing around with ad formats it used to ignore, like pre-rolls. Just a couple years ago, the site was primarily interested in “overlay” ads that run during the clip itself, at the bottom of the screen. But now pre-rolls are quite common; you may have also noticed Hulu-like options that let you pick the kind of ad you want to see, or even skip them altogether.
If you work somewhere where you can’t watch videos with copious cursing, then this video will not be safe for work. But it is excellent, and it is about advertising:
